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Sprouted Wheat Country Bread

Sprouted Wheat Country Bread

I have been on a bit of a country bread kick lately but I’m always trying to mix it up. For my latest variation I’ve replaced the typical 10% whole wheat flour in a country bread with 15% sprouted wheat.

Although I don’t have that much experience using sprouted grains it’s something that has always intrigued me. Mainly because of the purported health benefits but also because of the delicious flavor.

For one thing, when you use a sprouted grain like wheat you are using the entire grain. At this point it’s already much more nutritious than white flour but not any better than your average whole wheat flour. What causes sprouted grains to excel so greatly in nutrition is the activation of enzymes in the sprouting process. These enzymes breakdown some starches before they get to your body making bread made from these grains easier to digest. The sprouting also increases levels of some vitamins and protein.

On top of all these nutritional advantages sprouted wheat also tastes great! It is much more sweet tasting than whole wheat flour and doesn’t have any of the bitterness. It’s these flavors that led me to the idea of trying sprouted wheat in a country bread.

The finished loaf had outstanding flavor! It was quite sweet from the sprouted wheat and very mildly sour probably from making it as a straight dough instead of retarding. I feel like I could increase the sprouted wheat to 25-35% of dough weight and still get a great mild sprouted wheat flavor. If I went that high with normal whole wheat it would dominate the flavor and have that bitter whole wheat taste. I think I’m going to be using sprouted wheat a lot more often in my breads.

I too was very surprised by how white the crumb came out. The sprouted wheat is almost invisible in it, something that contributes to my belief that you could add quite a bit more sprouted wheat and still end up with a fairly light bread.

That's one good loaking loaf you baked there! I've never tasted sprouted wheat in a bread before, indeed a good idea, I wonder what will happen to the crumb structure if you increase the wheat amount as I'm not a big fan of very white bread. Thanks for sharing!

P.S. Your website looks very promising, I hope a lot of good stuff appears soon!

You should definitely try out some sprouted wheat, it really is a wonderful flavor and pretty fun to work with. I intend to push the sprouted wheat in my next bake so I will definitely find out what happens with the crumb. I'm guessing it will get a little tighter, much like adding whole wheat.

Thanks for the encouragment on the website, I'm doing my best to add content but it's a bit slow going as I'm baking full time during the day professionally. I'm looking to get a few more lessons up and hopefully some new online baking tools soon. Stay tuned!

grains in bread either as flour, sprout add ins and making diastatic and nondiastatic malt. All give some benefits either to the taste, color, digestability, nutrition, sweetness, starch coversion to sugar and keeping qualities of the bread. Your bread is a fantastic example of some of them. Nice baking.

of my posts on making red rye nondiastatic malt. It is as close to making it at home as I can manage since we can't take a foot deep and a foot high long rows of the sprouted grain and malt them naturally. By heating over 158 F the enzymatic action is destroyed so no help to converting starches to sugars for the yeast to eat. But we also make white diastatic malt where the temperature is kept at no more than 150 F and the enzymes are still available to convert the starch into sugar for the yeast.

The red helps the color of the crust and the keeping properties of the bread and the white does it's starch conversion thing. We also use the sprouts as shown without any drying for as add ins to the bread - just because we like the texture, nuttiness and enzymatic action they too provide. Makes for much healthier bread.

Hello,Wow, does your sprouted wheat loaf ever look good!I've baked with sprouted wheat flour from my local organic mill a couple of times over the last month and absolutely loved how the bread tasted; I'm with you re: resulting flavor, using this flour :^)

Thanks for the link to that article! I definitely like the direction he's going with his breads. Also, being of Norwegian descent, I found the whole thing facinating. I would really like to travel to the Scandinavian countries one day and try some of their breads first hand. I might have to start working on my own rugbrød soon. Thanks!

It seems like a very interesting formula. I really like the idea of combining beer and rye together. I'm curious what the flavor of it will be. I've always heard that you should keep fermentation on rye breads pretty short because they become very acidic with a longer fermentation but Robertson really extends it in this one. I'm definitely going to have to try this!

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